MMO Gaming

Recently Blizzard opened up transfers from the Gilneas realm (where I previously played, along with several other realms) to the new realm Drenden. The Gilneas server was located on the east coast, and had an east coast time offset (GMT-5). Blizzard announced that Drenden was an east coast server as well. For many people, this made us believe the realm was located, obviously, on the east coast, that would seem logical, to move from similar servers to similar servers.

When I first arrived on Drenden I thought my latency was a bit high (latency is a measure, in milliseconds, of how long it takes information to travel from computer to server, may also be known as the ping time) hovering between 200-300ms (it now jumps from anywhere between 250-800ms). On Gilneas I frequented between 30-100ms latency. I thought, like many others, this increased latency was due to server strain. The expansion had just been released, lot’s of people all crowded together, constantly fighting over mobs, it seemed reasonable enough. Then I headed back to Darnassus the one day to train after leveling my druid. Darnassus was deserted save for 4 others with me. My latency remained high. That’s the first time I thought that we were on server physically located on the west coast. I remembered playing on the Hyjal realm when I first started the game and experiencing similar speeds.

I’m not the only one who noticed, and I’m certainly not the only one who feels cheated, no scammed, by what Blizzard did. Several people paid to transfer from Gilneas, and similar realms to this new east coast server, they were cheated more than anyone.

In my mind, this is blatant disregard for players. With all the great things Blizzard has done recently, especially what a great job they did with the expansion, it’s easy to begin forgetting why Blizzard still has a ways to go with customer care. Then they do something like this and it becomes all too clear.

I don’t want the option to transfer to a different server, as some in that forum topic are suggesting. I want the Drenden server to be setup on the east coast and information copied over from the current server. I’m sure this could be done during a maintenance period, maybe even an extended one for “select realms”. It may seem unfair to say that I don’t want to move to another server given that I don’t want to have the latency, but I’ve set up a guild on Drenden already, made friends, begin running instances with pre-defined groups. I don’t want to lose people that might not transfer, especially for something that rightfully shouldn’t have happened.

I’m hoping this gets straightened out soon, I’ll try to keep everyone updated.

Blizzard, latency, ping, cheated, servers, slow gameplay, world of warcraft, realms